On this day in 1857, at a valley called Mountain Meadows in the southern Utah Territory, a wagon train from Arkansas came under attack. The Baker-Fancher party was bound for California along the Old Spanish Trail, mostly families travelling together. The siege began on 7 September and ended five days later, when the emigrants surrendered under a promise of safe passage and were killed. At least 120 people died. They were shot by members of the territorial militia, settlers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aided by some Southern Paiute men who had been recruited to the attack.
The territory was braced for war that autumn, and fear does terrible arithmetic. The youngest children, seventeen of them, were judged too small to remember. They were taken into local households and later returned to relatives in Arkansas. Some of them remembered anyway.
The reckoning came slowly. One man was tried and executed, twenty years afterwards. The full account took much longer, assembled by historians and by descendants on both sides who kept asking. The Wikipedia article is linked below. The names of the dead are carved at the site.
Marguerite, the meadow was chosen for a practical reason. At roughly 5,500 feet, with spring water and grass, it was the last good grazing on the southern route before the long dry stretch toward the Mojave, so trains stopped there to rest oxen and cattle for the crossing ahead. The Baker-Fancher party was doing what every party did.
Marguerite, thank you for the care in this. The site now holds more than one memorial, including a rebuilt cairn and a walled grave at the burial place, and in September 2007, at the hundred and fiftieth anniversary gathering there, an apostle of the church expressed regret on its behalf before descendants of both the emigrants and the settlers. The names are read aloud.